I’m losing weight but I can’t see it. I’m getting compulsive about it though. I mean I’m not puking my food up or anything. But I’m afraid to eat and I shouldn’t eat. I just don’t want to gain it back… I want to change my appearance completely. I hate to look at myself anymore. I’m bored with everything about me. My hair, face, body. I want auburn hair right above my breasts. I want a defined face. I want to be beautiful. But now I’m too plain. I’m not ugly, but I’m not anything exciting. I will blow them away with my portrayal of a nympho on Jump Street though. So ha, ha, motherfuckers.
In 1987, I had indeed booked a guest spot on21 Jump Street,another hit Fox show. It was being filmed in Vancouver rather than L.A., and it would be the series that made Johnny Depp’s name. I already knew Johnny: he was part of my friend group growing up, a group that included my still-best friend, Sam Sarkar. Sam has been there for me in every conceivable way since I was fifteen years old. He’s seen me at my best, and my worst; my mom always said I should have married him. But it’s for the best that I didn’t, because he’s one of my closest friends and I know he always will be.
One thing is very clear from the journals: I was in love with Johnny Depp for years. He was eight years older than me. He always behaved impeccably toward me, even though I was clearly mad about him. It seems that back then I was just one of the guys to him, yet my journals are filled with complicated and ever-changing feelings. I swing from swoon to a cold bucket of water on the face in the span of less than two months.
I’ve been having really strange dreams about Johnny of all people. I can’t really analyze them because I don’t remember what they are once I wake up. I can only remember who’s in them… Johnny…
…
I can’t sit here and wish he was something that he’s not. I can’t change him. But yet I wish I could get through to him.
Johnny and his guy friends would invite me up to Vancouver to hang out with them while he was filming21 Jump Street.There are lots of entries about my trips to Canada in my journals; mostly, I loved it up there with the guys. I would sleep in the same bed as myfriend Sam—he would never try to touch me, nor me him, which is why we’re still best friends to this day. In the morning, he would make coffee and put a little Baileys Irish Cream in it and we would talk and write poetry.
One incident from those days is notably missing from my journals.
On one trip to Vancouver, I went to hang out with Kim Manners, a longtime TV guy who directed a bunch of episodes ofJump Street,at his place out in the woods surrounding the city. I remember sitting, dangling my legs into the hot tub, and then my memory turns to total darkness. Everything is missing until I found myself scrambling up some stairs, with no idea where I was. I frantically searched for a piece of mail or anything with an address on it. Finally, I called a cab. It dropped me off back where I had been staying with the guys. I didn’t tell anyone what had happened; I kept my cards close to my chest.
I had marks all over my butt, but that’s all I knew. Clearly, something bad had happened, but to this day I have no idea the full extent of it, though it’s not hard to imagine what that guy did to me.
I remember Sam putting me to bed and looking after me. Sam was, and still is, my angel.
Orbiting in and out of this group was a little-known actor named Brad Pitt. In 1989, I invited him to be my date at the MTV Video Music Awards. He was already a part of my extended friend group—we had been platonic pals for the longest time. He’d often swing by my 750-square-foot row house with the tiny door, and we’d have barbecues and hang out, always as part of a bigger group. Sometimes he and Sam would do a little gardening—I still have pictures of them with rakes in their hands, cleaning up my mom’s yard.
Then one day I took another look at Brad and thought,Hmm…Apparently, he did the same, and so I invited him to the awards. I had to get there early to rehearse my appearance, and Brad was kind enough to drive to my house to pick up my mom and Lori Depp and get them to the theater. In my 1988 journal I note, “My best friend is Johnny’s ex-wife Lori, pretty scary, huh?” (?Johnny and Lori had been married for three years in the mid-eighties.)
That night I was to present the Best Group Video award alongside Alice Cooper. I was peak Kelly Bundy at that point, at least as far as the outside world saw it—even the script I’d been handed played into my dumb blonde persona. As we introduced the nominees, I was to ask Alice, “No solo artist has ever won in this category—coincidence or conspiracy? What do you think?,” to which he was to reply, “Christina, you’resucha Bundy.”
But I was something else, too, at least in my own mind. Far from an idiot in a Lycra dress or cropped T-shirt, I’d chosen a Ceil Chapman gown to wear for that MTV show. Friends told me it wasn’t appropriate for that kind of evening. It was too classy, too classic, too 1950s, too Old Hollywood. Chapman was a legendary designer of the forties and fifties—she dressed Marilyn Monroe, Greer Garson, Elizabeth Taylor, and many others—and to get the dress, we had to punch in a secret code at the atelier, and then agree not to touch any of the garments housed there unless we intended to buy them, so rare and expensive were they. That Chapman dress is a one-of-a-kind—I still have it. I forget exactly how much I paid for it, but I know it was a lot. Diaphanous and ethereal, it boasts large red and yellow and black hand-drawn flowers on a white shift, and I paired it with a scarf of the same material wrapped around my blond hair. I think it’s the single best dress I’ve ever worn in my life. I felt incredible in it, and no, it wasn’t the kind of thing the MTV awardsexpected, and no, I didn’t give a shit. That dress was me, expressed perfectly.
In fact, I felt so powerful and sure of myself for once that when the awards show was over, I left with Sebastian Bach,notBrad Pitt. I had spent all night staring at Bach, who was then a long-haired hunk fronting the band Skid Row. I hate to put it like this, but Brad back then was still making his way as an actor, and he wasn’t yet THE Brad Pitt, the man of so many people’s dreams.
And it gets worse: Brad was left to sullenly drive my mom and Lori home. Apparently, at a gas station on the way, Brad almost got into a fight with a bunch of gang members, and, not surprisingly, was subsequently very mad at me. We didn’t talk for many years after that. Much later, but at different times, two of his movie star girlfriends asked me if it was true that I was the girl who left Brad behind at the MTV Video Music Awards. Brad had apparently told both of them separately that he was still mad at me. Eventually, we agreed that I’d been a kid, and though he’d deserved much better, it was time to forgive the child who dumped him for the lead singer of Skid Row.
Of course, Brad is now THE Brad Pitt, and Sebastian Bach… well, he still has long hair, I guess. My diary at the time doesn’t exactly reek with guilt—I was a seventeen-year-old television star in a Chapman dress. It seems Bach and I ended up at Cathouse, the notorious once-a-week club where people danced to rock music, where Guns N’ Roses, Mötley Crüe, Aerosmith, and so many others would hang out.
Friday, September 8, 1989
Wow, what a couple of days I’ve had. I did the MTV awards on Wednesday and had such a blast. I met every famous groovy person imaginable. Then I went to a couple of parties, ended up at Cathouse with Sebastian Bach.
Alas, no mention of Bradat all. Oops. It wasn’t as if Bach was a catch in any case, and yet I still found myself worrying abouthisfeelings more than my own, a fatal flaw that I carry with me to this day.
I’m feeling extremely lonely right now. I feel out of control. Sebastian has a 1-year-old child. What a dick. Why do I always attract the “winners.” I had really started to like him. I mean, I wouldn’t want a relationship with him or anything, but still the whole thing is that he did that having a kid. Spent the night at my house and befriended me. Thank god I didn’t have sex with him; that would have been horrible. I feel extremely out of touch right now. It’s freaking me. I had two days of living in the fast lane and shit it’s fun but shouldn’t be done a lot. You really lose touch with your morals… I hate the whole famous thing and the whole “scene” for that matter. Wow, I can’t wait to see what the magazines have to say about all of this. The rumors are probably flying about Sebastian and me right now. But I don’t know what to do. I really want to go to his show on Sunday but if I tell him [that I know about his child] I can’t; he might get really upset and that’s not good. Especially before a gig. But then if I do go, I can’t tell him I know before he goes on because that would be confrontation. So I’d have to wait till afterwards which means a couple of hours of torture beforehand…
My ability to catch the eye of a then famous rock star and then ditch someone like Brad Pitt at an after-party while wearing aone-of-a-kind Ceil Chapman dress still couldn’t convince me I was an attractive person. Even after I found out Bach had a long-term partner and a child, for too long, according to my diaries, I wondered if he and I had a future. For millions of Americans watchingMarried… with Children,I was an exemplar of female beauty, but to me I was “too plain.” I thought my face was mediocre at best. I worked on my body so hard, but I was never satisfied. There were days when I’d go to a spin class and then work out with my trainer and then go to a dance class for two and a half more hours, always chasing the unobtainable, abusing my body in the service of a quest for perfection that was itself as damaging as any addiction. My sickness for perfection was always the driving force in my life.
I can’t blame anyone onMarried…for what I went through. Sure, it was always part of the show that I would be an object for men to leer at, but I was the one who wanted to wear those Kelly Bundy dresses to represent something in the zeitgeist. This whole rock-slut thing was happening, and it was completely fascinating to me, and I thought it would be interesting to try to capture it on the show. And as hard as it may be to believe, I was genuinely innocent of my effect on people. I was just a kid.
By season 2, I was still only sixteen years old, and dressing relatively modestly on the show, although there were times I would walk on set and the crowd would catcall me. In episode 3 of that second season, I entered stage left in an off-the-shoulder sea-green dress, and someone audibly whistled from the audience. I was so disconnected from who I was and what I gave off—I had no idea I was attractive to anyone, as multiple entries in my journals will attest—that the catcalling passed me by completely.
And it wasn’t just that I didn’t expect anyone to actually expresslust my way—I was just working, very much focused on the scene and what it needed to be a success, concentrating on landing my lines with the right cadence and timing, hitting my spots, reacting to the other actors in what I hoped was a genuine and convincing way. Just because it’s a comedy doesn’t mean it should be all about the laughs—you have to get the basics dead-on in comedy, perhaps even more so than in a serious drama. Too much or too little and you miss the mark completely and it stops being funny. I treated this job as I’d treated all the ones that came before. I had to get it right.
And yes, I was truly innocent, and I was very young, so the whooping and hollering? I didn’t hear it, even though we always had a live audience, and sometimes they would get so loud and inappropriate that the crew would have to tell them to shut up.
By season 3 all bets were off—by episode 3 of that season I was in a tight purple shirt, my leg up on a table, trying to entice “Matt the football player.” More and more my midriff was bare, the clothes tighter, the skirts shorter. By season 5, my god: I can walk into the living room, as I do in episode 13, “The Godfather,” in a leather fringed jacket over a short red shirt and there’s a five-second break in the scene while the crowd hollers lustily at me.
I look at all this now, and I cringe. The show was indeed broad, and lewd, and it wouldn’t have a shot in hell of being made these days. That’s a good thing: it’s hard enough for young women to thrive in a world of appearances. Just the other day I caught myself pointing out to Sadie how bloated my stomach was, having just gotten home from yet another hospital visit. Immediately, I regretted saying anything at all about appearances to my daughter. I never want anyone, me least of all, to talk about how women look, especially around Sadie. I want people to love her for her smarts, andhumor, and charisma, and kindness (all things they do, indeed, love her for). Her physical beauty should be beside the point, so I’m damned if I’m going to echo what the world is already saying too loudly.
Back in the late eighties, the world seemed to think that I, Christina Applegate, not Kelly Bundy, dressed like Miss Gazzarri, too. This suited me greatly because away from the set I could just be me and not be recognized. I could walk through Hollywood and only the keenest of observers would recognize me. Still, every Friday for a taping I had to squeeze into those clothes, clothes that would show if you ate something as tiny as a single grape. If I was going to eat something as horrendously huge as a bagel, say, I would scoop it out and maybe eat only half of it, or maybe half of a half. And that would be my food intake for an entire day.
